Though he received a classic yeshiva education, he later earned a doctorate at the University of Berlin and pursued rabbinic ordination at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. Heschel’s subsequent work—largely a series of poetic evocations of the phenomenology of traditional Judaism—was an attempt to make engagement with God possible for pragmatic modern Americans. His work, though, is clearly informed not only by a passionate love for Jewish learning and ritual, but by the philosophical richness of European thought and scholarship and his American intellectual peers, both Christian and Jewish.
On the surface, it might appear that Heschel’s project and the work of Saul Lieberman had little in common. Heschel was, in his distinctive way, both a Hasid and a poet; Lieberman was a pure talmudist, a classic Litvak. Heschel sought to speak to a wide lay audience, while Lieberman was interested only in the academy. Heschel became famous outside of Jewish and academic circles through his bold activism; Lieberman confined himself to the ivory tower. Heschel’s spiritual vision inspired two generations of JTS students, while Lieberman communicated a disdain for the vast majority of the students JTS obliged him to teach.
Yet as different as the two men clearly were, they actually were part of the same large religious project. Lieberman, a product of the European yeshiva of Slobodka who never really left Orthodoxy, wrote only two books in English. The almost identically titled Greek in Jewish Palestine and Hellenism in Jewish Palestine both trace the influence of Hellenistic culture on Jewish Palestine at the beginning of the rabbinic period. He was, in a broad but relevant sense, like Heschel, a product of two worlds whose research and writing focused on the collision of two somewhat analogous worlds two millennia earlier. By yoking his personal, old-world piety to the intellectual rigor of the academy, Lieberman modeled the claim that the two could coexist. And that was precisely what Heschel was claiming too.
Daniel Gordis, “Tradition, Creativity, and Cognitive Dissonance”, The Jewish Review of Books, vol. 6, no. 3 (Fall 2015), 5.